If you talk to CIOs who really “get” virtualization, the benefit that excites them the most is not cost savings but agility. I’m talking about the ability to say yes, quickly, to a business side request. Virtualization is helping smart IT leaders morph from “no” people to “yes” people. That’s a huge shift for many IT organizations and companies. But in order to be a yes person, you need to have enough carefully-managed virtual infrastructure on hand.

Physical HBA Storage adapters

•  16 HBA’s per ESX host (dual port, quad port or 8 port)
• Provides 32 paths to a single LUN
• Total amount of paths supported 1024
• 256 LUNS can be presented to a single ESX server (128 during installation, the remainder can be added later)
• 256 VMFS partitions per ESX host.

VMFS Sizing 

• The current maximum size for a single VMFS volume is 64TB
• A VMFS volume will support a maximum file size of 2TB 
• Maximum number of files supported 30,000

VMDK Sizing

• Maximum VMDK size is currently 2TB (with 8MB block size)
• Maximum VMDK size is currently 256GB (with 1MB block size)

From within a Virtual Machine

• Maximum virtual HBA’s per virtual machine is 4
• Maximum targets per virtual HBA 15
• Maximum VMDK’s (virtual machine disks) per virtual machine 60 (windows and linux) 

Regards,

Lee Wynne 

Feel free to join me on linkedin 

This is a bit cheesy, but outlines some of the benefits of deploying ESX, Virtual Center and VDI.